Scholarship Search

Answer 1

While there are many ways to search for scholarships, perhaps the easiest way find scholarships is to search on the internet.

Students should start their searches with their high school counselor's office and the financial aid office of the college they will attend. This is because the competition for these scholarships is less intense than for scholarships available on state and national levels.

Still, millions of dollars of scholarships on these levels go unclaimed every year, so a wise student will search out all opportunities.

Students Should Profile Themselves

Before starting the search, students should profile themselves, listing information such as choice of major, anticipated occupation after graduation; religious and ethnic backgrounds; whether their parents, grandparents or other ancestors are military veterans and the specific wars they fought in; age, and any physical disabilities. These will form the nucleus for their search terms.

Armed with this information, students should turn to their favorite search engine or engines. It's a good idea to use more than one search engine as different search engines use different criteria for displaying results. One search term may show up as No. 1 on a small search engine, but 120 on a large search engine.

When entering search terms, it doesn't make too much difference whether students start the search with the broadest or narrowest terms and then work the other way. The results should be the same.

Example of Search Terms

For example, assume a woman student, who is Black, wants to be a broadcast journalist. The search terms she would use to start would include scholarships for journalists, then progress to scholarships for broadcast journalists and scholarships for women journalists. She would then add the term Black to each search: Black journalists, Black broadcast journalists and Black women journalists, as well as do a search for scholarships for Blacks. The end result should be dozens of scholarships.

The possibilities of turning up scholarships are endless for students who are creative with their search terms. Then the problem becomes one of not finding scholarships, but deciding which ones to apply for.